Night Watch
by marzoog
Summary: Not all buds blossom, and not all stories have happy endings. (WalterUna)


_Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day _

_Stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops. _

_I must be gone and live, or stay and die. _

**-William Shakespeare**

**O&O&O**

Not all buds blossom, and not all stories have happy endings.

It is dark. There is milky smoke coming in from under the rim of his tent. If it were not for that, he could have been at home, in Rainbow Valley, spending the night in a pitched tent. The smoke reminds him. Reminds he just who he is, and what he is doing.

He is Walter Cuthbert Blythe, and he is a murderer.

There is only one book on his makeshift desk of a board over cot frame. _Les Miserables by Victor Hugo_, the cover pronounces in perfectly enunciated tones. Ironic, he thinks, that his last book should be about outcasts from society.

And, of course, that is should be prose. He was always a man for poetry.

"_'You're aiming at that sergeant, Enjolras,_" he reads, "_but you're not looking at him. He looks a charming young man, and he is certainly brave. One can see that he thinks-these young artillery-men are highly educated. No doubt he has a family, a father and mother, and probably he's in love. He can't be more than twenty-five. He could be your brother.'_

_'He is,' said Enjolras._"

He closes the book with a little slam. And thinks of the brothers he has killed.

**O&O&O **

The tapers are burning.

The darkness from the windows surrounds, encases, but white rabbit hole's the world, makes it seem possible that she could tumble right into Wonderland. She could be anywhere in that darkness. She could be with him, all in milky dark.

He is no Achilles, she reminds herself. And he is no Hector. Perhaps, after all, he is a Paris. He has stolen beauty from Spartan ships, and now Menelaus is coming to claim it. He love will destroy them all, before it destroys himself.

Or perhaps it will only destroy her.

Perhaps she has already been destroyed long enough. Perhaps she will say "no problem" while her heart is ripped into pieces the size of her words in letters she writes to him.

And that's all her world has become, really.

That's all that's left of the darkness outside her windowpanes.

**O&O&O**

Daylight gives no balm.

When he was little, he used to welcome the sun as if it were a prodigal returning home. He remembers his mother oftentimes telling the tale of how, when he was ten, he asked for some cake and glasses of milk.

After being asked why, he exclaimed that he was going to have a welcoming party for the sun when it came up. He was going to give it something because it must have been hungry after that long, long trip away.

He no knows how that sun must have felt, rising over the cusp of Rainbow Valley every morning. His journey must have at least been that long. If not longer.

**O&O&O **

_London bridge is falling down falling down_

There is a crudeness about daylight, she thinks, and it gives such unnecessary truth.

It will not tell her what she wants to hear, it will give her no images of love, life, and happiness. Of Him (with a capital H) who does not even seem to care that she inhabits the same planet.

Nighttime must be a harlot, who will give a man whatever they want to see. A trollop who masquerades for all to imagine what is beneath its gauze. In nighttime, dreams and desires are answered (a lover's whisper of unfulfilled promises).

Daylight makes them sterile.

Talc beneath her fingertips, falling unto unused ground.

**O&O&O**

In the end, he is free.

There is so little stuff connecting his soul to others' that being set loose is more of a boon than a loss. Perhaps he has found that close love is not exactly something he can handle, not with….(_dontthinkitdontsayitdontdontdontdontdont_)…

BLOOD. (His mind screams the word.)

He cannot love with so much blood on his hands.

Red is always such a romantic color, roses and hearts, candies and Valentines, but people forget its darker side. People let it slip through their minds that red is also blood, also the color of that which destroys as well as that which gives.

This red will never wash away. He is branded with it.

Oddly, at this moment, he thinks of her. Of her blue eyes which could take away the red, could neutralize it, with their overwhelming dark-edged moonlight cerulean. His pen is hovering in mid-air, a little letter to Rilla, but there seems to be nothing quite so important as reaching her. He is desperate to communicate with her _that if I could love anyone once I have gotten through the red brand, it would be you._

_It would be you. _

**O&O&O**

She has a dream one night, all alone in her cold bed.

_There is light, and warmth, and joy. There is a little black haired grey-eyed child, sitting by the tree lovers, reading a book of Tennyson. This child waits till it hears a call from the house on the hill calling it home. _

_There he runs through the door, to find his mother smiling over a pot of hot food, his father's jovial welcome as he is setting the table (his father told him girls like it if you do that sort of thing once in a while), and his sisters laughing as they come down the stairs to the kitchen. (_What a lovely home this is!_ he thinks) _

_His mother smiles continually, his father laughs at the silly things he and his sisters say as they eat, and night falls into its silvery cocoons, all the beauty and love surrounded in safe warmth. _

This is the future you would have given someone, a voice inside whispers to her.

And she wonders in the morning why there are tears on her pillow.

**O&O&O**

There is an infinite of lives not lived as large as the stars.

He knows this as he wakes in the morning, fully realizing it will be the last time he ever does so. So many choices, paths, bends, crooks, and crannies to life's possibilities that there is never time to even being to comprehend where they could have taken us.

He knows that someday there will be peace. That someday, this blood bath will end. That there will again be little children playing on this field, that sometime there will be safety for the families that will live here.

And that he has helped them achieve it.

Comforted, he steps out of his tent to begin this day, knowing it is his last.

_AN. Yet another one of marzoog's random fics that don't make sense. Hope you enjoyed and hope that you review. And hope that you have a great day!_


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